"There, Steve, I was merely teasing. Men of my age have a poor way of joking sometimes.... I mean to postpone that trip. Indeed, I do, Steve. You're a handful, and I've got to keep hold of you for a long while yet."
Jim overheard that much:
"A handful? Rubbish!" he remarked. "Send her to bed at nine for the next few years and be careful about her diet and censor her reading matter. That's all Steve needs to become a real grown-up some day."
Stephanie had risen to face the shafts of good-natured sarcasm.
"Suppose," she said, "that I told you I had sent a poem to a certain magazine and that it had been accepted?"
"I'd say very amiably that you are precocious," he replied tormentingly.
"Brute! I did! I sent it!"
"They accepted it?"
"I don't know," she admitted, pink with annoyance; "but it won't surprise me very much if they accept it. Really, Jim, do you think nobody else can write anything worth considering? Do you really believe that you embody all the talent in New York? Do you?" And, to Cleland Senior: "Oh, Dad, isn't he the horrid personification of everything irritatingly masculine? And I'll bet his old novel is perfectly commonplace. I think I'll go up to his room and take a critical glance at it——"
"Hold on, Steve!" he exclaimed—for she was already going. She glanced over her shoulder with a defiant smile, and he sprang up to follow and overtake her.